Sarva-Darśana-Saṃgraha

Book Summary

Traditionally attributed to Mādhava Āchārya, a fourteenth-century scholar and minister associated with the founding of the Vijayanagara empire and later head of the Śṛṅgerī maṭha, the Sarva-Darśana-Saṃgraha (‘Compendium of All Philosophical Systems’) is one of classical India's most ambitious works of comparative philosophy. Rather than simply refuting rival views from a single standpoint, Mādhava sets out to present each school fairly, in something close to its own preferred terms, before moving on to the next — arranging the sixteen systems (his edition's final, sixteenth chapter on Śṛṅkara's Advaita Vedānta was never completed by Cowell and Gough and is not included in this translation) in an order of ascending sophistication that culminates in his own Advaita Vedānta school.

The survey opens, provocatively, with the Cārvāka or materialist school (Chapter I), which denies any authority beyond direct perception and any survival of the self after death — a school Mādhava treats seriously enough to state its arguments in full before setting it aside. He then turns to Buddhism (Chapter II) and Jainism, styled the Ārhata system (Chapter III), followed by the theistic Vaiṣṇava school of Rāmānuja (Chapter IV) and the dualist system of Madhva, here called Pūrna-Prajña (Chapter V) — Mādhava's own philosophical rival, whom later tradition (probably wrongly) sometimes confused with the author of this very book.

The middle chapters work through the several branches of Śaivism — the Pāśupata system of Nakulīśa (VI), the broader Śaiva-darśana (VII), the recognition (Pratyabhijñā) school of Kashmir śaivism (VIII), and the alchemical Raseśvara or ‘Mercurial’ system (IX), which holds that mercury, ritually prepared, can confer a divine, immortal body — before moving into the six classical orthodox darshanas that form the core of the Sanskrit philosophical curriculum: Vaiśeṣhika atomism (X), Nyāya logic under its traditional name Akṣhapāda (XI), the ritual-exegesis school of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā under Jaimini (XII), and, more unusually for a philosophical compendium, Pāṇini's grammatical system (XIII), which Mādhava treats as a darśana in its own right.

The translation closes with Sāṅkhya (XIV), the dualist system of consciousness (puruṣa) and matter (prakṛti) that underlies classical Yoga, and Patanjali's Yoga-darśana itself (XV, the longest chapter in this volume), covering the eight limbs of yogic discipline and the meditative attainments (siddhis) it describes. A short appendix on the technical concept of upādhi (a limiting adjunct used across several of the schools' logical arguments) closes out Cowell and Gough's 1882 translation, which — as they note in their preface — stops one chapter short of Mādhava's own culminating account of Śṛṅkara's Advaita Vedānta.